


In The Face Of Sacred Majesty

by elviaprose



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Animal Transformation, Be Careful What You Wish For, Character Turned Into A Cat, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29805930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: When a demon offers to grant a wish for Uriah Heep, he wishes never to have to be humble before anyone. In answer to that wish, he's transformed into a cat.
Relationships: David Copperfield/Uriah Heep
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	In The Face Of Sacred Majesty

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to x_los for the beta. HUGELY appreciated, as always.

_Tis very true, Kings do not use to call Cats to an Account for their looks, or their undistinguishing Boldness: But there are many Cats of this Kind, which are too much made of, indulg'd, and encourag'd, 'till they fly at last in the Face of sacred Majesty. - Oswald Dykes_

Uriah Heep’s sleep was abruptly interrupted by an unfamiliar weight pressing down on his chest. He had been snoring on his back, lost in a troubled rest on a narrow little bed in a narrow little room in the legal district of London. Three months had passed since Uriah’s schemes against Wickfield had been exposed, and Uriah had spent every waking hour of those three months in a dismal rage. Now, he opened his eyes to see that a tiny hobgoblin had settled itself on his chest, and was looking down at him. By nature shrewd and wakeful from the moment his eyes cracked open in the morning to the moment they closed at night, Uriah would have startled to full sharpness immediately had there not been some power in the creature’s gaze that lulled and dulled him. He looked up at it, and though his forehead creased in thought, the wheels of his mind turned with a strange, unaccustomed gentleness. 

“I am here,” the creature said, “to grant you a wish. Ask me a favor, and you shall have it.” 

“Why grant a wish for me, umble as I am?” Uriah asked slowly.

“It is because,” the creature said with a laugh and a flutter of its small, clawed hands, “you are so delightfully awful.”

Uriah laughed soundlessly and unsmilingly at this. He still stared straight into the creature’s eyes. They were strangely akin to those of an owl, huge in its pointed face. In full possession of himself, Uriah would have been careful and lawyerly in anything he asked. He was not so now. Under the influence of that hellish gaze, the words he spoke spilled from him, unconsidered and reckless. 

“Bring an end to all my umbleness. I ask to live without ever bending, ever scraping. I ask to live as lord and master of all about me, proud as a prince,” he said.

“Delightful! Oh, I’ve chosen well with you!” The creature crowed. “All men on earth must bend sometimes, but do I see a way to do it? Yes! I surely do! A lucky fellow you are. You said you’d like to live, or I might have stopped your heart. But now, this is much better.” It smiled very, very widely, hopped into the air, and snapped its toes as if they were fingers. 

“Let it be done!” it said. 

Uriah’s body writhed and contorted, then, more extremely than it ever had before. It writhed so hard that it actually shrank. And shrank. And shrank again. Shapes that had before seemed familiar loomed, shadowed and enormous, before, him. Curiously he no longer perceived the room to be dark, yet the colors that daylight had always brought before him were absent. All was shadow, outline, and movement. The few fragments of moonlight that came through the rickety window caught his eye, entrancing it with their motion on the scuffed floor.

“A cat may always be proud as a prince,” the creature said, with a horrible little chuckle. Then, it seemed to wink entirely from existence. 

A cat. He had been transformed into a cat.

Uriah yowled in rage, and began launching himself to and fro about the room in a wild fury. Tricked! Tricked! He should never have made such a careless request if he had not been held in thrall. And now he was no longer a man. He had been given what he had asked for, but in such a way that it was nothing but another curse upon him. What could he strive at, now that he was a mere animal in a world of men? Tricked! 

***

Mrs. Heep had not been asleep. She had been lying awake, looking up into the darkness and worrying her hands together. She did not think she would ever again know a sound night’s rest, so long as her Uriah remained in the state he was in. So black and dangerous was his anger at the world. So wild were his schemes! All she wanted was for him to be safe, to be content, and she was so very, very tired of fearing for him. Tired to death. If she had not feared the trouble he would get into if she left this world, she would have wished to die and be free of this terrible care. 

A loud yowling from the next room interrupted her from these thoughts. “A cat!” she cried in surprise, for the door and all the windows had been shut up tight. “Ury! A cat has gotten in! Are you safe?” 

Lighted candle in hand, she hurried into her son’s room. The sight that met her eyes was an empty bed and a wide eyed tomcat tearing about the room.

Mrs. Heep was as sharp as her son. She looked at the cat with a hard, shrewd look. She noted his long, terribly thin body. She noted that his eyes were strange green-red discs that caught the candle queerly. She noted his ginger coat. She noted her Uriah’s unexplained absence and this creature’s unexplained presence. She considered the fact that there had always been some strange, infernal power in her son, something ambitious and wild that put his soul at odds with his body. She looked, she saw, and she concluded that Uriah had wrought himself into the creature before her through some black art he had found out. 

She looked down at him, and he looked back up at her with eyes that were simply too familiar. If there was some trick of turning himself back again, she thought, he would be a man now. He would turn back and explain himself in his own voice. No, was a change that wouldn’t be undone, wasn’t it? 

“Oh Ury,” she sighed, and tears slipped from her eyes before she knew they would fall. “What have you done to yourself? Will you be all right like this? Will you be the better for it? I suppose you will be, won’t you?”

Like this, he could be free of drudgery, at least. Free of work that put him into such bitter fury at the world. Her Uriah loved to work - there never was a harder worker, but he despised any task that seemed to aim at lowering him. She knew her son would rather be a criminal than a drudge, if only because through crime he could punish those he despised. She had hoped that he could climb in Mr. Wickfield’s household, staying humble all the while, and so come to be satisfied, and she had helped him where she could in it. Nothing so sure as that scheme was left to him, now. Yet in this transformation, perhaps there was some chance at safety after all.

When he had been a very young boy, he had been so eager to learn everything, so bright and quick at school. That had been cruelly corrected. Education, he had been told, was to answer questions, but to teach boys such as him to understand the blessing of hard, honest toil. He had understood well what was meant by that, even so young. She had said to him, when he asked if it were really true, that perhaps it was and perhaps it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter, in the end. If he acted humbly, he would come up farther than if he didn’t. He had better do as told and not ask any more. She knew he had never forgiven her and his father for those words, though she couldn’t regret them. He had lived by them a long, long while, and for all the trouble he had found, wouldn’t it have been ten times greater if he had never learned to be humble? 

But not now. Now he had found a way out of it, hadn’t he? He might do as he pleased now. Pry into all sorts of places, be as inquisitive and nosy as he liked. Hold his head up. The world was, of course, filled with dangers for a cat, but her son was clever enough to keep himself safe enough from dogs, poisons, and the like; it was other, subtler traps that always snared him; those he made for himself through spite and vengefulness. He had done what he must.

She walked to the window and opened it wide for him. Her heart felt heavy and light at once. He had found a way to be free and happy. She might have a moment of her life that was not consumed with fear for him. Still, she would miss the parts of him that were gone. His conversation. His hand on her arm, always gentle no matter how angry he became. 

“Come back tomorrow, won’t you? I do love you, Ury,” she said softly. 

She thought he seemed to mark her request before he sprang up out of the window and into the night, but she could not be sure. 

***

For a time Uriah Heep tore through London town, furious and afraid. The world seemed a nightmare, every object transformed into something towering and strange. Tricked! He cried and cried again. Tricked! He eventually halted his flight atop a tall old ruin of a garret. He had climbed it without a thought, instinct giving him a nimbleness he did not need to consider. His small heart beat furiously in its breast. The wind blew, the clocks chimed. He heard them all, even the faintest, most distant ones.

Perhaps it is simply impossible to be in any sense a cat (though he was still in his soul a man) in the prime of its strength, perched high above a city, in the deep of a clear night, and not feel joy. As he balanced himself upon that roof, a giddy, dizzy, heady feeling crept on him, leeching his rage. It was a feeling near to what he had felt the night he had confessed all he could of his heart to Copperfield and begged Copperfield to admit what Uriah knew: that he did not love Uriah the way Uriah loved him. He had come back nearly drunk on the pleasure and pain of saying so much. Now he felt that rush of drunkenness again. He leapt, simply for the pleasure of leaping, and worked his way to a higher gable still, and marveled at how quick he had become, how powerful. Just as he had wished, he no longer had to shamble and cringe himself down to a decent height. He arched his back deliciously.

London lay before him. Strange, dark alleys and broad bright paths.Fish, rotting and fresh. Windows to look in, secrets of men and other creatures to spy out. Birds to catch and kill. And Copperfield to see again. He had been sure he would never have a second chance at another meeting with Copperfield like his first. Then they had been merely boys, and they had looked and looked at each other and drunk each other in, and Copperfield had not hated him at all. Now, perhaps. Perhaps.

Perhaps, he thought, he had been too quick to despise his new state. 

***

After a night of exploring and a long, shockingly pleasant nap in what had once been the attic of a ruined and partly roofless building, he found himself ready to seek out Copperfield. It was easy. Uriah knew London well, knew where Copperfield was likely to be found, and could make his way readily enough to where he needed to go. He darted through alleys and crept into carts, enjoying stowing himself away and being lazily carried a little closer before leaping down again.

**

There he was, at the end of the street. Awareness of Copperfield immediately blazed through his senses. Uriah had feared that his experience of Copperfield would be muted and muffled, would lack its best qualities. There would be no looming over him, no looking slyly from beneath his lids to snatch a look at those wonderful eyes of his. Would Copperfield be little more than a shadow or a ghost, seen from so low to the ground, and leached of all of his colors? Yet upon reaching Copperfield at last, he was nearly overpowered by how  _ much  _ of Copperfield there was. Uriah knew the smell of Copperfield and his bear grease (lighter now than it had been in his early manhood, yet still very present), knew his boots, knew the rhythm of his tread. He had not before realized how significant these things were, how overwhelming they could make his presence. 

Copperfield was returning home after buying a book of some kind. Uriah darted after him, following at a close distance. They had only gone two blocks before Copperfield wheeled on him.

“You’re following me!” he exclaimed.

For a moment, Uriah forgot himself and began to cringe and writhe back in humble denial. “Following you? Oh, no, Master - I mean Mister - Copperfield!” Then, he remembered that he was, in short (as that fool Micawber was so fond of saying and never meaning), a cat. He had often repeated to himself Copperfield’s words on the subject of humbleness: “I am sure you have no occasion to be so, unless you like.” Uriah’s private mockery of those words had been bitter and cruel, his fury deep. But now, they were, at last, quite true. He really did have no occasion to be humble, unless he liked. 

He approached, head high, a challenge in the swish of his tail and a saunter in his gait. Copperfield bent down to him, intrigued and charmed.

“What a hideous cat,” he said in a soft, pleased voice. 

Uriah found this quite amusing. Copperfield always had liked his ugliness, after a fashion. It was no surprise that he was taken with him in this form, really, but there was certainly an irony in it.

Copperfield did not put a hand out to him. He was cautious of a strange creature, and would not risk it. Uriah was surprised at how much he wanted a friendly touch from Copperfield, how absolutely starving he was for it. How little rage he still felt at him now that Copperfield was before him again, looking at him with nothing but curiosity and liking. He ruthlessly quieted the voices that said that this affection was not his to have, not right or good to take, and twined himself about Copperfield’s ankles.

“How friendly it is,” Copperfield exclaimed, half to Uriah and half to himself, and Uriah’s heart beat quick. “And yet it looks such a wary, canny creature. I shouldn’t have thought you would be so bold with me. But perhaps someone else has been giving it meat or milk. If you follow me a little further, you daring thing, you may have some from me.”

Uriah followed Copperfield home. He took his milk on Copperfield’s doorstep, enjoying the pressure of Copperfield’s eyes on him as he lapped it. Then, his promise to his mother remembered, raced off into the streets in the direction of his mother’s garrett, struggling to master the many feelings within his small cat’s breast. 

***

Daily, Uriah became more and more a companion to David Copperfield. Copperfield, having lost his young wife and his dear friend Steerforth almost at a blow, was lonely and full of grief. He faced the feeling that a river had been crossed and could not be recrossed, that he had moved on from the brightest chapters of his life and onto duller, emptier ones. He wondered if he would ever again love anyone so carelessly and freely, without thought to the harm it might do to them, or to the world. He hoped he wouldn’t, yet he mourned the loss of the joy it had brought him. So very, very little seemed to comfort him. Company felt almost intolerable. Reading was difficult. Yet he found in the cat’s hard features and rangy form something powerful, something new. He was flattered beyond anything that such a creature had become his particular friend. And so it had. It followed him on his long, wandering paths through London (though it often also left him, to leap and wander alone). He began to invite it in, and soon it slept curled beneath his bed. He delighted in spoiling it with fish and milk, and it let itself be spoiled (he thought it was a little less thin than it had been, though it was still the gangliest creature he had ever seen). He read aloud to it at night, from whatever essay or story he had worked on during the day. He would often revise as he went, finding that he heard the words differently, understood their qualities with more insight, when he performed them for this audience. Though he knew the cat could have no understanding of the words, he thought it liked the cadences of his voice, liked to watch and wonder at him. 

Privately, he called the cat Uriah, for though he had no thought that his friend could truly  _ be  _ Uriah, the resemblance was so striking that he found it irresistible. His friends and family did not know that this was his name for the cat. How could he justify this practice of calling a thing so loved and doted upon (even Traddles teased him for it) by the name of his worst and most hated enemy? If the cat had merely been a lurking shadow, a sight passed by each day and remarked casually upon, he could have called it so as a joke and been well understood (though Agnes still would have frowned upon it). As it stood, it really could not be explained. 

David had considered trying to lose his grief abroad, but abroad he would not have the cat’s company. If he was gone for even a day on business, the creature became testy with him, and required soothing. He was sure it would forget him soon enough if he left for months or years, but he knew for his part he would miss it, and worry over it, and would lose the best thing he had found to cheer him. He could admit that it was the most effective cure he knew. And so he stayed.

***

Uriah missed being a creature of ambition and malice. He missed the nurturing of grand, spiteful schemes. He had lived upon, fed upon, the small, subtle, poisonous currents that passed between himself and others. It was different, now; all of that was gone. There were still times when he regretted his reckless wish. Yet there were so many pleasures to be had, some entirely new, some akin to those he had known before. The first time he caught and killed a bird, it filled him with a great, wonderful sense of power. A hunger for such forbidden surges of triumph had propelled him to great cruelty as a man. Half in irony and half in earnest, he brought the bird to Copperfield, wanting to enjoy his sweet, shocked disapproval just as much as he ever had in his other life. He wondered if he had at last become a murderer - something that even he had feared to become, and had counseled himself hard against in his blackest moments. No, he assured himself, it had only been a bird, after all, however titanic the triumph had seemed. He had eaten fowl before, as a man. Who thought it murder to kill a bird? 

Copperfield’s company was the best pleasure of all. What a wonderful, clever, gentle companion Copperfield was! Uriah greedily drank in the soul-deep pleasure it was to be stroked, to be cherished, to be called by his true name by someone he loved so much. He labored daily to persuade himself that he did not deceive Copperfield, did not hide himself from him, for all that was in his nature still Uriah Heep, Copperfield saw. It was said that a cat had nine lives. Well, the first life of this particular cat had been that of a man, and Copperfield’s bitter enemy, but now he was no longer. Now he was some other creature, something neither quite man or beast, and in that form he was Copperfield’s friend. In that form Copperfield knew him and loved him, and he loved in return, with a fierce devotion. He knew he would have readily died for Copperfield if any situation required it. As it was, he did what he could by mousing for him assiduously.

He missed being able to read for himself (he still possessed the ability, but his cat’s vision made the letters nearly impossible to distinguish from the page itself, and besides, to be caught at it would be quite a scandal), but he could admit that he had never enjoyed reading to himself half so much as he enjoyed hearing Copperfield read aloud to him. He had never read anything like Copperfield’s diverting, humorous essays and serial chapters before, having confined himself before to the most serious and practical materials. He had loved the way a difficult book could seize his whole mind, the way hours could slip away as he thought and worked at it, tooth and nail; now he discovered that the written word could also transport him with delight and amusement such as he had never known. Sometimes, on lazy, sunlight afternoons, Copperfield would take a break from his writing and read the plays of William Shakespeare aloud to him, performing with even more vigor than he put into his own work, and giving Uriah no end of entertainment. Uriah loved to see what Copperfield found to enjoy in each line, which words he savored and which made him frown, being strange and difficult. Copperfield had often frowned in just that way at things Uriah had said to him, and he had always loved it when he did. There was something indescribably charming to Uriah in seeing that bright, handsome face of Copperfield’s engaged in any puzzle.

As a man, even what little power he had managed to grasp from the world had derived from his humility. It had always been with him, at once a hurt and a help, a comfort and a torture. Now for the first time he moved freely, acted pridefully, held himself like he was afraid of no one. It was a balm to his soul.

He had lost and he had gained by his wish, but on the whole he found himself happier in his life than he had ever thought to be.

***

A year and a day after the goblin demon’s first visit, the creature returned. Uriah was once again asleep. This time, he lay curled beneath Copperfield’s bed, as had become his custom. The creature did not even trouble itself to wake him. It simply laughed a horrible laugh, once more snapped its toes, and vanished again into its demon world.

Uriah still slept sprawled beneath Copperfield’s bed, but he was now returned to his human form.

***

Uriah’s snoring woke David. He looked beneath his bed, and there he saw Uriah Heep, asleep where his cat had been.

David, ever imaginative and fond of the idea that magic might, at any point, reveal itself to be still in the world, found he could readily believe what many would have denied to their last breath: that the cat had been Uriah all along.

Uriah found himself rudely shaken awake. Looking into his face, he saw the most wretched look he had ever seen from Copperfield in all his life.

***

Uriah had surprised David by staring him down with bitter defiance. It seemed that Uriah had, in his his year living as that creature, nearly entirely forgotten how to be anything but proud. He had been entirely naked, yet he had shocked David by all but commanding David to bring him a dressing gown to put on. 

Now he sat upon a chair in the corner of David’s bedroom, wrapped in that too small robe. David thought he could see Uriah trying to remember how to hold his body as he had held it before, how to writhe and abase himself, how to look out slyly from under his lids. His eyes blazed with feeling as they stared directly into David’s own. 

David himself looked at the floor, unable to meet his gaze for long. His heart beat fast with a shamed panic. He felt his soul so painfully exposed by all Uriah had seen and known, felt betrayed to the very marrow.

“You know, I really believed that creature loved me,” he said finally. He did not need to know how Uriah’s transfiguration had happened, if it had been an accident or deliberate. It hardly mattered. Perhaps he would find it out in time. 

“Cats don’t love anybody, Mister Copperfield,” Uriah replied, in a voice uneven with disuse and passion. “You know that, don’t you? It cuts me, I must admit, that you should believe it of a creature like that, when you never would believe it of me even when I confessed to you I did.” 

It was true that for years, ever since he was a boy, and long before the confession Uriah spoke of, David had known in some obscure corner of his mind that Uriah loved him, in his way. But there had never seemed to be anything to be made of it. Every kindness David had ever tried to do him had been rejected with venom. There had never been any friendship to be found in him. 

“You are right to object to that. I’ve nearly always known you loved me,” David said in a voice flat with anger and hurt. “But what was I ever to do about it? You wouldn’t even let me teach you Latin.”

“You hoped I would refuse, though, didn’t you? It wasn’t a true offer, was it now, though you’ve nearly persuaded yourself it was.”

David fell silent. He didn’t know, now. As always with Uriah, what had seemed in one moment a perfect, lapidary truth receded into a mist of doubt the moment the other man spoke. He had a moment ago felt so justly resentful at the fact that Uriah had never let David do anything kind for him. Yet if David hadn’t wanted to do him any favor, then why should Uriah want him to, even if Uriah did love him? Hadn’t David always wanted his Aunt Betsey to be kind to him out of love, and not simply because she did not know what else to do with him? Hadn’t he always sought to reassure himself that she liked to be good to him? David knew he had wanted to be kind to that cat, had spoiled as much for himself as for anyone, as he never had done with Uriah (though it was certainly a lot of ask that he had, given how completely horrible Uriah had always been). 

“I ‘ave been so happy, Copperfield,” Uriah said, taking David by surprise, for he had thought they had been talking about how unhappy David always made him. “I have liked to comfort you, to be a friend to you. I have liked to look you in the eye proudly, to be bold with you. I have loved to walk beside you wherever you went. I have loved for you to read to me from all your writing. You know, I have seen so many wonderful things that I could tell you of. If you would let me still come to you--if I could tell you a thing or two of interest, for your own delight, or for anything you were writing. Perhaps you would permit me? Even now, as we sit here, I could tell you about the fog over the river at midnight, and what it smells like, or what it is to stand high on a roof and hear all the clocks chiming.” 

It was a handsome offer. David felt sad, and wistful, and hopeful, all at once. There was a great deal for him to forgive, but Uriah had indeed been a friend to him for a year and a day already. It remained to be seen how life as such a creature had changed Uriah, and if for the better; it remained to be seen whether they could mend what they had each begun breaking almost from the instant they had known each other. But hadn’t they already started, in their way?

In the last days of their acquaintance, Uriah had become so hideous to David that he could hardly bear to look at him. Taking his hand had made David’s skin crawl and his stomach tighten and his lungs feel heavy. Now, having spent so much time doting on Uriah in his altered form, David found he almost could not understand how that could have been. He was so very appealing, in his own way. David traced the lines of his body with his eyes, let himself notice how very familiar Uriah was to him now, how fond of him he had become. 

“If you can play the cat,” David said, “I suppose I might play the king. Though I hope I will not be so much a tyrant as the Sultan in the old story was.” He smiled (had he ever smiled at Uriah when he was not a cat?), and watched Uriah drink the expression in like it was wine. “Well then, my Scheherazade, lay on." 


End file.
